In my first post on the financial crisis, The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy posted on September 16th, I suggested that the root cause of our financial woes is ultimately a lack of demand. At the root of this problem is wealth inequality.
The middle class squeeze leads to low consumer confidence. People begin to stop spending. For example, high gas prices pulled people's discretionary funds into fuel and retail sales of items like cars begins to slow. Such a trend begins to spiral into recession. The root cause is a lack of wages rising with prices of vital items. Low wages lead to lowered demand which leads to recession.
In the current crisis, this slowing demand is multiplied by a crisis in the financial markets. The financial crisis has many causes but one of them is that on the fringes people that are squeezed begin to default on their homes. In situations where financial institutions are highly leveraged the result is failed banks.
So what is needed of course is a bailout of the financial institutions by creating liquidity and the government acting as the guarantee of certain failing types of financial services. Basically, the government has to inject into the system more cash. This addresses the financial crisis but what about the recession. The recession is addressed by one fundamental type of action. The government must put money in the hands of consumers. This happens though tax cuts, a stimulus plan and general wealth distribution.
Yes, wealth distribution.
Why Wealth Distribution is Needed
Lets simplify the scenario to make the situation clear. Let's say that one person owns all the food and has all the cash. What will happen to his food selling business. The food will rot and the people will starve. The problem is people cannot buy the food. There is no demand. In this situation, in order to save the wealthy man's business, he has to give money to the consumer. In order to stop a recession and save capitalism requires wealth distribution when wealth inequalities are overly polarized.
Life is like a game of monopoly. If one person has all the money, the game is over. The game comes to a halt. In order to start the game again, you have to give some money to the losers. In times like these, we need demand side economics to drive demand and re-start the economy. Some politicians may call this socialism but in fact this is simply economics 101.
brad
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
Uncommon Wisdom - The Need for a Life of Strenuous Thought
I often quote what I think is a quote from Charles Spurgeon in reference to George W. Bush. Spurgeon said, “It takes thirty years to prepare a sermon”. His point is that inspiration and insight into the mind of God and the scope of the themes of scripture takes a lifelong commitment to the study of scripture and its application in one’s personal life. Such a quest involves a life of strenuous contemplation of the ways of God. Such a life is a arduous seeking for wisdom.
The bible calls us to seek wisdom in our youth so that in the time of calamity she may be found. The fool, in their moment of need, will cry out for wisdom and she will not be found. Wisdom or skill in any area of life is not easy to come by but must be diligently sought over a lifetime.
In today’s world, this is even more true. We live in an ever increasingly complex world. In our modern way of life, if we are to contribute to society we must become a specialist and an expert. The wisdom of expertise only comes from a lifelong quest for knowledge in one’s chosen are of focus.
The founding fathers were stunning in their commitment to the study of governance. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were intellectuals in the extreme. Out of the strenuous work to understand the history of governance, they studied the history of the Classical period and were literate in the original languages of the Greco-roman world. John Quincy Adams was instructed to read Cicero in the original Latin by his father when he was a mere twelve year old boy. The seeking of knowledge and wisdom was considered a civic duty. The fact of the matter is that wisdom is not a commonly held commodity and common sense is no wisdom at all.
But in the 21st century, we have come to believe that if a person is “one of us” and is not an elite or overly educated person, then he or she is more likely to have the common sense needed to represent us and understand us. This principle flies in the face of the reality of the process of obtaining wisdom in any area of life. Would we want one of “us” common uneducated folk performing open heart surgery on our father or proposing a treatment for our wife’s breast cancer. Do we want the doctor who finished in the bottom quarter of his class? I contend that it is even more difficult to govern a nation.
Do you want a doctor to fix your car or a car mechanic to do your plumbing? Neither ought we to expect a business man to be an expert at governing.
If we have learned anything from the Bush years, it should be that we do not want a common mediocre student or intellect as President of the United States of America. The myth that the elite students of the world make poor leaders is simply nonsensical. Real problems, complex problems, require the best and the brightest that the nation can offer if we are to find the nuanced and balanced solution that can withstand the test of time. What we need are intellectuals and students of history to lead the institutions that effect us as a society, both church and government. What we need is a person who has struggled to understand and sought wisdom all his days. If we have learned anything from recent years, may this be the lesson we have learned.
The bible calls us to seek wisdom in our youth so that in the time of calamity she may be found. The fool, in their moment of need, will cry out for wisdom and she will not be found. Wisdom or skill in any area of life is not easy to come by but must be diligently sought over a lifetime.
In today’s world, this is even more true. We live in an ever increasingly complex world. In our modern way of life, if we are to contribute to society we must become a specialist and an expert. The wisdom of expertise only comes from a lifelong quest for knowledge in one’s chosen are of focus.
The founding fathers were stunning in their commitment to the study of governance. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were intellectuals in the extreme. Out of the strenuous work to understand the history of governance, they studied the history of the Classical period and were literate in the original languages of the Greco-roman world. John Quincy Adams was instructed to read Cicero in the original Latin by his father when he was a mere twelve year old boy. The seeking of knowledge and wisdom was considered a civic duty. The fact of the matter is that wisdom is not a commonly held commodity and common sense is no wisdom at all.
But in the 21st century, we have come to believe that if a person is “one of us” and is not an elite or overly educated person, then he or she is more likely to have the common sense needed to represent us and understand us. This principle flies in the face of the reality of the process of obtaining wisdom in any area of life. Would we want one of “us” common uneducated folk performing open heart surgery on our father or proposing a treatment for our wife’s breast cancer. Do we want the doctor who finished in the bottom quarter of his class? I contend that it is even more difficult to govern a nation.
Do you want a doctor to fix your car or a car mechanic to do your plumbing? Neither ought we to expect a business man to be an expert at governing.
If we have learned anything from the Bush years, it should be that we do not want a common mediocre student or intellect as President of the United States of America. The myth that the elite students of the world make poor leaders is simply nonsensical. Real problems, complex problems, require the best and the brightest that the nation can offer if we are to find the nuanced and balanced solution that can withstand the test of time. What we need are intellectuals and students of history to lead the institutions that effect us as a society, both church and government. What we need is a person who has struggled to understand and sought wisdom all his days. If we have learned anything from recent years, may this be the lesson we have learned.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Health Care - Krugman Article
This week is definitely going to be about mudslinging tactics (or is that strategy?) and health care policy. I admit Krugman of the NYT seems to just speak DNC talking points, but the guy is a pretty smart guy. Great article this morning.
Krugman on health care.
brad
Krugman on health care.
brad
Monday, September 29, 2008
Financial Bailout defeat in Congress - A Cowardly Lack of Leadership
For many years, I refused to delve into politics or economics for that matter as I did not want such issues to alienate people from the message of the Kingdom. Times have changed and the need for voices is urgent. Such voices are not coming from congress.
In a move that is pure politics, house members on both sides of the aisle ignored reality and listened to the panic of their constituents. Such caving to public outcry is not leadership.
David Brooks says it well, in his Nihilist Revolt editorial in the NYT:
They (congress) have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed.
showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing.
What we need in this situation is authority.
The American century was created by American leadership, which is scarcer than credit just about now.
What has happened is "chickens coming home to roost". The republicans and some liberal democrats have such disdain for government that they refuse to lead with government action. The following are elements of this total inability to lead:
1. Ideology. We have seen the fruit of ideology in the Bush administration. Ideology is the stubborn adherence to ideals without regard to the changes in situations and circumstances. This is not a time for conservative ideals. What is needed is pragmatism and nuance.
2. Politics. When acting in a crisis one must let the facts and our reason guide us and public opinion must be ignored. Such political expediency transcends party affiliation. Such are our times.
3. Anti-intellectualism: As I listen to the naysayers of government action, I am appalled by the lack of depth and both presidential candidates are not helping the discussion. Where is Robert Rubin? Where is Robert Reich? We need students of history to solve difficult problems like those we face today. In the dialogue, there is no substance. Such depth what really amounts to wisdom is the product of a life of strenuous study of policy and governance. Unfortunately, the public no longer trusts intellectuals so they place "one of our own" in office. That's fine if there is no need to solve a difficult problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.
We must question ourselves as to whether this is the first major blow to the head of American leadership in the world. It is time we begin placing in leadership both in the church and the state leaders who are equipped intellectually to look the facts in the face and take pragmatic and effectual action.
brad
In a move that is pure politics, house members on both sides of the aisle ignored reality and listened to the panic of their constituents. Such caving to public outcry is not leadership.
David Brooks says it well, in his Nihilist Revolt editorial in the NYT:
They (congress) have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed.
showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing.
What we need in this situation is authority.
The American century was created by American leadership, which is scarcer than credit just about now.
What has happened is "chickens coming home to roost". The republicans and some liberal democrats have such disdain for government that they refuse to lead with government action. The following are elements of this total inability to lead:
1. Ideology. We have seen the fruit of ideology in the Bush administration. Ideology is the stubborn adherence to ideals without regard to the changes in situations and circumstances. This is not a time for conservative ideals. What is needed is pragmatism and nuance.
2. Politics. When acting in a crisis one must let the facts and our reason guide us and public opinion must be ignored. Such political expediency transcends party affiliation. Such are our times.
3. Anti-intellectualism: As I listen to the naysayers of government action, I am appalled by the lack of depth and both presidential candidates are not helping the discussion. Where is Robert Rubin? Where is Robert Reich? We need students of history to solve difficult problems like those we face today. In the dialogue, there is no substance. Such depth what really amounts to wisdom is the product of a life of strenuous study of policy and governance. Unfortunately, the public no longer trusts intellectuals so they place "one of our own" in office. That's fine if there is no need to solve a difficult problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.
We must question ourselves as to whether this is the first major blow to the head of American leadership in the world. It is time we begin placing in leadership both in the church and the state leaders who are equipped intellectually to look the facts in the face and take pragmatic and effectual action.
brad
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Understanding N.T. Wright - Tools for the Task – Part 2 - Critical Realism part 1
In my first post, Tools for the Task part 1, I discussed N.T. Wright overarching goal or his life work. N.T. Wright has embarked upon what he calls the Third Quest. Wright’s quest is to, in light of the abundance of extra-biblical evidence concerning 1st Century Judaism, develop a historically grounded hypothesis about how Christianity developed. A key quote for N.T. Wright, having reflected upon the first two quests for the historical Jesus is “when all was said and done, they dug a well and found at the bottom a reflection of themselves.” Wright is saying that these theologians used methodologies which were not critical enough and their conclusions ended up being a reflection of their own preconceived worldviews. What happened in the 20th century quests for the historical Jesus is that the theologians did not utilize the proper historian’s “Tools for the Task”. The result is the pop culture misconceptions about Christian origins which I wrote about in Part 1 of this series.
The First Tool for the Task – Critical Realism
Defining Critical
In our family, I often ask my older children the question, “What is the worst thing a person can be?” The answer they usually give is, “A compliant thinker”. Next I ask, “And what is the opposite of a compliant thinker?” The answer they give, “A critical thinker”. In my mind, one of the great enemies in the 21st Century is anti-intellectualism. To use our intellect and to be lifelong learners, we must understand what it means to be a critical thinker.
A critical thinker is a person who is constantly pursuing a revision of two perspectives: first, the perspective given to us and, second, our own perspective. In other words, a true critical thinker is constantly aware of how his own preconceptions and the preconceptions of others undermine learning and getting the process of getting closer and closer to reality. This critical approach is the first tool for the task which is the critical side of critical realism. To be critical means being constantly aware of the role that perspective plays in the telling and listening of any and all truth claims. Being critical is in many ways the foundation of the scientific method. We are constantly seeking to re-evaluate and therefore improve our understanding of reality by questioning and challenging both our own understanding and the accepted wisdom. We ask ourselves, “Is there another perspective which can help me see things clearly? What is the tellers stance? What is my stance?" We are always aware that, as subjects, both the teller of the truth and the hearer of the truth participates in the knowing process. Therefore, as learners we must use certain tools to be enable us to be skillful critics of both ourselves and the accepted wisdom in order to be active and skillful critical thinkers. To be a critical thinker, one must be both arrogant enough to question the accepted dogma and humble enough to critique one’s own preconceptions.
So that is the critical part of “Critical realism”. The next term to understand is the term "realism”. I will discuss this term in the next post. As we proceed, with other terms which N.T. Wright spends considerable time defining including, “worldview”, “theology”, “story”, “hypothesis and verification”, we will come to see how incredibly helpful these tools are to understanding both the biblical texts and the origins of Christianity.
The First Tool for the Task – Critical Realism
Defining Critical
In our family, I often ask my older children the question, “What is the worst thing a person can be?” The answer they usually give is, “A compliant thinker”. Next I ask, “And what is the opposite of a compliant thinker?” The answer they give, “A critical thinker”. In my mind, one of the great enemies in the 21st Century is anti-intellectualism. To use our intellect and to be lifelong learners, we must understand what it means to be a critical thinker.
A critical thinker is a person who is constantly pursuing a revision of two perspectives: first, the perspective given to us and, second, our own perspective. In other words, a true critical thinker is constantly aware of how his own preconceptions and the preconceptions of others undermine learning and getting the process of getting closer and closer to reality. This critical approach is the first tool for the task which is the critical side of critical realism. To be critical means being constantly aware of the role that perspective plays in the telling and listening of any and all truth claims. Being critical is in many ways the foundation of the scientific method. We are constantly seeking to re-evaluate and therefore improve our understanding of reality by questioning and challenging both our own understanding and the accepted wisdom. We ask ourselves, “Is there another perspective which can help me see things clearly? What is the tellers stance? What is my stance?" We are always aware that, as subjects, both the teller of the truth and the hearer of the truth participates in the knowing process. Therefore, as learners we must use certain tools to be enable us to be skillful critics of both ourselves and the accepted wisdom in order to be active and skillful critical thinkers. To be a critical thinker, one must be both arrogant enough to question the accepted dogma and humble enough to critique one’s own preconceptions.
So that is the critical part of “Critical realism”. The next term to understand is the term "realism”. I will discuss this term in the next post. As we proceed, with other terms which N.T. Wright spends considerable time defining including, “worldview”, “theology”, “story”, “hypothesis and verification”, we will come to see how incredibly helpful these tools are to understanding both the biblical texts and the origins of Christianity.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Week Round Up - Financial Crisis
This week I for the first time got a little passionate about policy. In these posts,
1. The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy
2. More on the Financial Crisis
My approach is to actually look at the root of the financial problems. Look beyond deregulation and the need for more liquidity to why are people defaulting on their mortgages.
What the government has done is protect money market mutual funds which is absolutely essential to assure that these safe havens are sustained. These are funds that many companies use to hold cash that ultimately is needed to make payroll. But this is only an emergency measure. The root causes are not yet being deeply and honestly discussed.
Here is a fact -
The pricier loans in the jumbo category racked up delinquency rates that are more than triple what they were just a year ago, and those overdue payment statistics may quadruple before the end of 2008. - Sept 2, 2008
Jumbo prime mortgages are foreclosing. The definition of a jumbo is a loan that is beyond the limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which is $417,000). The real reason the mortgages that are failing are jumbos is because jumbo loans are needed to buy houses in the market since the housing boom of 2002-2006. But nonetheless, the people failing these types of mortgages are prime borrowers.
Also what is happening is that due to inflation MANY people are forced to take out HELOCs to pay the bills. This puts the first mortgage at risk. All this comes back to wages and inflation.
Everyone normally looks at the "the mortgage crisis" but seemingly ignores at least one side of the mortgage problem: low wages with respect to inflation and the middle class squeeze. Everyone seems to think the only problem with the low value of mortgage backed securities is the sub-prime problem, but this is not the source. These fire-priced mortgages that Lehman owned were not sub-prime but "alt-A" and "prime Jumbos". What happened is that these specific types of securities were being downgraded from the "AAA" rating. This downgrade forces money market mutual funds to sell as these funds are required to only hold "AAA" assets.
Why are alt-A graded loans failing? An alt-A is really a loan to a person with a credit score of 580-680 (below 580 is sub-prime)? It has to be because these people's wages didn't grow as expected in a normal cycle. The current statistics are worse than normal. Folks, this has to be wages.
I still hold to wages and inflation being at the root of the problem. The thing to look out for in the policy of a given candidate is what policies will be put in place to deal with the following:
1. Out-sourcing
2. Middle class tax cuts
3. Alternative ways to incentivize wage growth
brad
1. The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy
2. More on the Financial Crisis
My approach is to actually look at the root of the financial problems. Look beyond deregulation and the need for more liquidity to why are people defaulting on their mortgages.
What the government has done is protect money market mutual funds which is absolutely essential to assure that these safe havens are sustained. These are funds that many companies use to hold cash that ultimately is needed to make payroll. But this is only an emergency measure. The root causes are not yet being deeply and honestly discussed.
Here is a fact -
The pricier loans in the jumbo category racked up delinquency rates that are more than triple what they were just a year ago, and those overdue payment statistics may quadruple before the end of 2008. - Sept 2, 2008
Jumbo prime mortgages are foreclosing. The definition of a jumbo is a loan that is beyond the limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which is $417,000). The real reason the mortgages that are failing are jumbos is because jumbo loans are needed to buy houses in the market since the housing boom of 2002-2006. But nonetheless, the people failing these types of mortgages are prime borrowers.
Also what is happening is that due to inflation MANY people are forced to take out HELOCs to pay the bills. This puts the first mortgage at risk. All this comes back to wages and inflation.
Everyone normally looks at the "the mortgage crisis" but seemingly ignores at least one side of the mortgage problem: low wages with respect to inflation and the middle class squeeze. Everyone seems to think the only problem with the low value of mortgage backed securities is the sub-prime problem, but this is not the source. These fire-priced mortgages that Lehman owned were not sub-prime but "alt-A" and "prime Jumbos". What happened is that these specific types of securities were being downgraded from the "AAA" rating. This downgrade forces money market mutual funds to sell as these funds are required to only hold "AAA" assets.
Why are alt-A graded loans failing? An alt-A is really a loan to a person with a credit score of 580-680 (below 580 is sub-prime)? It has to be because these people's wages didn't grow as expected in a normal cycle. The current statistics are worse than normal. Folks, this has to be wages.
I still hold to wages and inflation being at the root of the problem. The thing to look out for in the policy of a given candidate is what policies will be put in place to deal with the following:
1. Out-sourcing
2. Middle class tax cuts
3. Alternative ways to incentivize wage growth
brad
Thursday, September 18, 2008
More on the Financial Crisis
This is my second political posts in two days...If you haven;t read the first post read it here:
The Root Cause of the Financial Depression
This second post is my editorializing on today's freakonomics post in the NYT.
Why did Freddie and Fanny fail:
Update; WaMu is up for sale today. WaMu is the biggest savings and loan in America
From the NYT: Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals
Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages.
Why did Lehman fail:
…Why did the financing dry up? For months, short-sellers were convinced that Lehman’s real-estate losses were bigger than it had acknowledged. As more bad news about the real estate market emerged, including the losses at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, this view spread….Lehman’s costs of borrowing rose and its share price fell. With an impending downgrade to its credit rating looming, legal restrictions were going to prevent certain firms from continuing to lend to Lehman.
Again can you say housing….It all goes back to people trying to turn sub-prime mortgages and Lehman and Fannie and Freddie and everyone else sports fans are caught holding the bag. Why did this happen? Because in Bush’s first term, it was politically expedient to push home ownership especially in light of the opportunity due to de-regulation.
How about A.I.G.
Here it is…
A.I.G. had to raise money because it had written $57 billion of insurance contracts whose payouts depended on the losses incurred on subprime real-estate related investments. While its core insurance businesses and other subsidiaries (such as its large aircraft-leasing operation) were doing fine, these contracts, called credit default swaps (C.D.S.’s), were hemorrhaging.
Why did this housing market problem happen?
People took too much risk and believed that something had changed in housing and therefore prices would never go down. This was a really stupid idea based in wishful thinking. The only way we could have believed this was that when all these sub-prime variable mortgage loans came due there would be INFINITE DEMAND for houses. But instead, there was a glut of houses and very little demand. Why so little demand? Low wages.
So why did people choose to believe what amounts to self-deception?
Greed and because de-regulation allowed them to do it. To do what, to put all of us at risk for the big bucks.
So this is my point about why it makes no sense in my mind for Christians to believe in republican free-market ideology. We as Christians know that the world is driven by greed and the will to power. So why are we against regulating greed and power in the markets. Because Christians have been duped by right wing politics that bundled together right to life issues and right wing economic dogma.
So why did we fall for this trap? It is because of our anti-intellectualism and our lack of thoughtful dialogue in our own communities about politics and other such issues. There is no room for discussion because there is such a huge social cost for not heeding the party line. Trust me. I know.
Brad
The Root Cause of the Financial Depression
This second post is my editorializing on today's freakonomics post in the NYT.
Why did Freddie and Fanny fail:
Update; WaMu is up for sale today. WaMu is the biggest savings and loan in America
From the NYT: Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals
Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages.
Why did Lehman fail:
…Why did the financing dry up? For months, short-sellers were convinced that Lehman’s real-estate losses were bigger than it had acknowledged. As more bad news about the real estate market emerged, including the losses at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, this view spread….Lehman’s costs of borrowing rose and its share price fell. With an impending downgrade to its credit rating looming, legal restrictions were going to prevent certain firms from continuing to lend to Lehman.
Again can you say housing….It all goes back to people trying to turn sub-prime mortgages and Lehman and Fannie and Freddie and everyone else sports fans are caught holding the bag. Why did this happen? Because in Bush’s first term, it was politically expedient to push home ownership especially in light of the opportunity due to de-regulation.
How about A.I.G.
Here it is…
A.I.G. had to raise money because it had written $57 billion of insurance contracts whose payouts depended on the losses incurred on subprime real-estate related investments. While its core insurance businesses and other subsidiaries (such as its large aircraft-leasing operation) were doing fine, these contracts, called credit default swaps (C.D.S.’s), were hemorrhaging.
Why did this housing market problem happen?
People took too much risk and believed that something had changed in housing and therefore prices would never go down. This was a really stupid idea based in wishful thinking. The only way we could have believed this was that when all these sub-prime variable mortgage loans came due there would be INFINITE DEMAND for houses. But instead, there was a glut of houses and very little demand. Why so little demand? Low wages.
So why did people choose to believe what amounts to self-deception?
Greed and because de-regulation allowed them to do it. To do what, to put all of us at risk for the big bucks.
So this is my point about why it makes no sense in my mind for Christians to believe in republican free-market ideology. We as Christians know that the world is driven by greed and the will to power. So why are we against regulating greed and power in the markets. Because Christians have been duped by right wing politics that bundled together right to life issues and right wing economic dogma.
So why did we fall for this trap? It is because of our anti-intellectualism and our lack of thoughtful dialogue in our own communities about politics and other such issues. There is no room for discussion because there is such a huge social cost for not heeding the party line. Trust me. I know.
Brad
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Depression in the Financial Markets – The Solution is Wage Inflation via Tax Policy
My annual political post...
From the very beginning, I was against the Bush tax cuts. Back then, I refused to enter the fray of politics as a pastor, so I kept my mouth shut except around the dinner table. The reason I was against the Bush tax cuts is that I do not believe in the ideology of supply side economics in the information age. There is too much access to market data, and, therefore, businesses do not invest in growth without strong demand data. Due to the access to data, the 21st century is a demand driven economic world. What is needed today is a balanced approach which supports business and also supports the consumer. Immediately, we need a pendulum swing toward support for the consumer. The crisis we are in today is 100% the result of a lack of money in the hands of the consumer caused by relative wage deflation. Let me explain.
In our current financial crisis, the problem is that the financial markets are getting tight. Insurance and mortgage companies like AIG are having trouble getting credit to make and insure loans. The result is we have a bottleneck in the financial system. The cause of this bottleneck is because AIG and others cannot put up enough collateral for the loans they need. Why all of a sudden are the big financial institutions unable to put up enough collateral? It is because the only real paper of value that they hold is “mortgage backed securities”. It ain’t called real estate for nothing. As we all are so very aware, people are defaulting on mortgages. Therefore, mortgage backed securities are not great collateral. It all comes down to the housing market.
Well, who pays mortgages? Well, people do. The middle class pays mortgages, and the only way to slow down the bleeding in the housing market is to increase the cash in the hands of the middle class. Currently, the middle class is experiencing the big squeeze. In simple terms, us middle class folk will rent before we will starve. We will default on our mortgage and rent before we will stave our children. Thus, the middle class home owner numbers are shrinking, and the lower middle class renters numbers are exploding. This is the big American economic nightmare. The answer to this housing/mortgage problem is not a stimulus plan. The money is not in the coffers of the government. Excluding the sub-prime side of the mortgage crisis, the problem is wealth inequality and relative wage deflation.
The actual big money that is needed to bail the system out is in the hands of employers in the form of business profits. Sorry sports fans but the real root cause of this problem is two-fold. First, it is an ideological drive to support supply side economic policy (i.e. republicanism) and its big policy application, the Bush tax cuts. The fact is the trickle-down didn’t trickle down in the global economy of the 21st Century. Greed got the best of us this time.
The answer is simple – tax policy. What must happen is the government must make a tax policy which gives tax credits to businesses for wage increases. If a company shows an increase in wages to employees, then they get a tax credit. Otherwise, they get a big fat tax increase on profit. This problem we are in is a serious housing crisis that only employers can solve and employers will only solve this problem by raising wages when the government forces their hand. The only question is how hard the government should push.
The bottom line is it all comes down to demand and, specifically, demand for MORTGAGES. The only way to drive demand for mortgages is to increase the wages of the middle class. The only people who can increase the wages of the middle class are employers and the only way this can happen is TAX POLICY.
From the very beginning, I was against the Bush tax cuts. Back then, I refused to enter the fray of politics as a pastor, so I kept my mouth shut except around the dinner table. The reason I was against the Bush tax cuts is that I do not believe in the ideology of supply side economics in the information age. There is too much access to market data, and, therefore, businesses do not invest in growth without strong demand data. Due to the access to data, the 21st century is a demand driven economic world. What is needed today is a balanced approach which supports business and also supports the consumer. Immediately, we need a pendulum swing toward support for the consumer. The crisis we are in today is 100% the result of a lack of money in the hands of the consumer caused by relative wage deflation. Let me explain.
In our current financial crisis, the problem is that the financial markets are getting tight. Insurance and mortgage companies like AIG are having trouble getting credit to make and insure loans. The result is we have a bottleneck in the financial system. The cause of this bottleneck is because AIG and others cannot put up enough collateral for the loans they need. Why all of a sudden are the big financial institutions unable to put up enough collateral? It is because the only real paper of value that they hold is “mortgage backed securities”. It ain’t called real estate for nothing. As we all are so very aware, people are defaulting on mortgages. Therefore, mortgage backed securities are not great collateral. It all comes down to the housing market.
Well, who pays mortgages? Well, people do. The middle class pays mortgages, and the only way to slow down the bleeding in the housing market is to increase the cash in the hands of the middle class. Currently, the middle class is experiencing the big squeeze. In simple terms, us middle class folk will rent before we will starve. We will default on our mortgage and rent before we will stave our children. Thus, the middle class home owner numbers are shrinking, and the lower middle class renters numbers are exploding. This is the big American economic nightmare. The answer to this housing/mortgage problem is not a stimulus plan. The money is not in the coffers of the government. Excluding the sub-prime side of the mortgage crisis, the problem is wealth inequality and relative wage deflation.
The actual big money that is needed to bail the system out is in the hands of employers in the form of business profits. Sorry sports fans but the real root cause of this problem is two-fold. First, it is an ideological drive to support supply side economic policy (i.e. republicanism) and its big policy application, the Bush tax cuts. The fact is the trickle-down didn’t trickle down in the global economy of the 21st Century. Greed got the best of us this time.
The answer is simple – tax policy. What must happen is the government must make a tax policy which gives tax credits to businesses for wage increases. If a company shows an increase in wages to employees, then they get a tax credit. Otherwise, they get a big fat tax increase on profit. This problem we are in is a serious housing crisis that only employers can solve and employers will only solve this problem by raising wages when the government forces their hand. The only question is how hard the government should push.
The bottom line is it all comes down to demand and, specifically, demand for MORTGAGES. The only way to drive demand for mortgages is to increase the wages of the middle class. The only people who can increase the wages of the middle class are employers and the only way this can happen is TAX POLICY.
Jesus is the Christ - The Promise That We Will Never Thirst
All the Promises are Yes and Amen in Christ
Jesus the Christ Promises that His disciples will Never Thirst
We have so far established that the Gospel is the proclamation that “Jesus is the Christ”. Next, we need to understand the extent of the change we can expect as a result this new reality that Jesus is the Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth. Life as human beings know it and as we experience life has changed profoundly. In this section, I intend to elaborate upon the scope of this new life we can experience. Looking at human existence and at the 21st Century church, we might think that certainly not every thing has changed. Life is certainly not “heaven on earth” for every Christian. Also, many preachers in the church take advantage of people by promising blessings from the Gospel that are not actually promised. Nonetheless, my aim is to show that at the most important aspect of human experience a great change has taken place which effects our experience of life quite profoundly and to such a positive extent that our testimony will be that we have found the key to life and happiness. So let’s look at what aspect of human experience that has changed now that Jesus is the Christ and that he is Lord of both heaven and earth.
An overview of the Promises that Jesus makes to those who place their faith in Him
To understand the transformation of life which Jesus brings it makes sense to look first at the promises Jesus Himself made to those who place their faith in Him as the Christ.
Let’s begin with an over view of the gospel of John.
In John 4, Jesus, speaking to a Samaritan woman says,
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you ‘give Me a drink’, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water…whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst”.
Picking up the metaphor of water in chapter 7, Jesus says,
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the scriptures said, ‘from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.”
John the author explains in the next verse saying,
“This He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive”.
Here Jesus is bolding making Messianic claims by saying that the promises of a time of refreshing and restoration had arrived in Himself and that the promise of a river of living water would come to all who put their faith in Him as the Christ. So what does this promise of “never thirsting” and having from our innermost being flowing a river of living water.
First, what does it mean that whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst.
First, this promise is a reference to the believer’s experience. To thirst and to have that thirst quenched with spring water is the analogy Jesus uses to describe the blessings that He brings to those who believe in Him. Consider a man lost and without water for a day or two. He hears from a fellow traveler that there is a spring about five miles due west. The man points the way to the spring. The direction is clear and the man gives a few land marks to follow. Our thirsty man starts in this direction. He goes over the hill and sees in the distance a pool of water. He begins to pick up his pace and begins to feel hopeful. With the water about twenty feet in front of him, he smiles in relief. Everything is going to be alright. He sits at the pool of water and begins to drink. He can feel the satisfaction of his body. He splashes his face. He rests and spends a few hours drinking deeply. This is a picture of the Christian life. Christianity is not about hoping to one day drink but Jesus says He will send His spirit and we will actually drink to our satisfaction and this experience of satisfaction will flow from us and satisfy others. We not only will drink from the well of blessing that Christ brings to us but we will be a source of this blessing to others.
Often Christianity is seen as a journey to heaven or a life of hope but in Jesus’ promise Christianity is not a life of hope or a life of hoping to one day drink the living water but is a life of actual drinking. Jesus gives us water and we drink it. This point is essential to understand. The experience of faith is not the experience of hope that helps one endure. This would be to describe the Spirit like a map directing one on a journey to water and life as the journey, but this is not the metaphor Jesus gives. Jesus says that we will actually drink the water. The promise of Jesus the Christ is that whoever is thirsty “let him come to me AND DRINK”. The life of the disciple is not essentially one of being inspired and encouraged to continue in the journey but to regularly arrive at an experience of drinking. This speaks of a spiritual experience of actual conscious connection with the Spirit of God which results in satisfaction and restoration.
The analogy of the man in the desert actually can be contrasted with the Christian walk in that the desert traveler’s level of desperation is not experienced by the disciple of Jesus as shown by the saying “never thirst”. The disciple is never so distant from the Spirit as to have his dryness be described as thirst. Personally, I do not know if in the physical sense I have ever actually experienced thirst. I have certainly had an experience where I desired to be satisfied by water but never in a situation where I was desperate for water. I have all my life lived in a home or was near running water. All I have ever had to do was to make a short walk and I could satisfy my thirst. Never have I been in a situation where I was at a loss as to where I could get water to satisfy my thirst. So too with the disciple, who has learned how to follow Jesus or as we shall see learned how to follow the teachings of Jesus. The disciple is a person who has learned how to get to and how to drink spiritually.
To explain this essential point I must jump ahead a little. In the next section, I will discuss mankind’s true problem as a lack of ability to live beautifully and morally. The root of this inability is a lack of conscious contact with our Father in heaven. Our emotional make-up “under the sun”, in a state of separation from conscious awareness of God according to the truth, is to lack what it takes emotionally and psychologically to love in every circumstance. The difference between the disciple and natural person is how we respond to conflict. The disciple who has deep in his or her emotional make-up an awareness of God’s love has the power to turn the other cheek and forgive and love his enemy from the heart. The power to live beautifully and morally and filled with unconditional love is conscious experience of God in the moment of conflict.
For example, I met just the other day a man who drank himself to sleep every night. He was filled with self-loathing that he could not drive from his consciousness without the aid of serious self-medication. This man is experiencing desperate thirst. He is filled with 10,000 various forms of fear and anger. His need is discipleship. Discipleship is the process where through obedience to the spiritual ways of Jesus our perspective on life becomes immersed in the presence of the grace and love of God. This new awareness of God empowers us to live a life satisfied by God alone, and, having learned this way, we are equipped to give to others a cup of water to quench their thirst.
This ability to satisfy one’s spiritual need like a person drinking water is not an ability all Christians possess. This ability is the outcome of the process of discipleship. Many Christians who have never been discipled are as spiritually dissatisfied and live lives just as dysfunctional as anyone. More on this later.
So this first saying of Jesus reveals that Jesus promised us that we would experience a life of satisfaction which He calls “never thirsting”. This is a promise which few have faith to believe but the fact is Jesus said it and to believe in Jesus is to believe Jesus. If we remain thirsting then the problem is a lack of understanding of the dicipleship process in our life. We lack the training on how to go about the process of drinking. The answer is not to lessen the promise but to acept the challenge to become a student of Jesus and enter into the promises of the Christ.
Jesus the Christ Promises that His disciples will Never Thirst
We have so far established that the Gospel is the proclamation that “Jesus is the Christ”. Next, we need to understand the extent of the change we can expect as a result this new reality that Jesus is the Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth. Life as human beings know it and as we experience life has changed profoundly. In this section, I intend to elaborate upon the scope of this new life we can experience. Looking at human existence and at the 21st Century church, we might think that certainly not every thing has changed. Life is certainly not “heaven on earth” for every Christian. Also, many preachers in the church take advantage of people by promising blessings from the Gospel that are not actually promised. Nonetheless, my aim is to show that at the most important aspect of human experience a great change has taken place which effects our experience of life quite profoundly and to such a positive extent that our testimony will be that we have found the key to life and happiness. So let’s look at what aspect of human experience that has changed now that Jesus is the Christ and that he is Lord of both heaven and earth.
An overview of the Promises that Jesus makes to those who place their faith in Him
To understand the transformation of life which Jesus brings it makes sense to look first at the promises Jesus Himself made to those who place their faith in Him as the Christ.
Let’s begin with an over view of the gospel of John.
In John 4, Jesus, speaking to a Samaritan woman says,
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you ‘give Me a drink’, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water…whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst”.
Picking up the metaphor of water in chapter 7, Jesus says,
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the scriptures said, ‘from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.”
John the author explains in the next verse saying,
“This He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive”.
Here Jesus is bolding making Messianic claims by saying that the promises of a time of refreshing and restoration had arrived in Himself and that the promise of a river of living water would come to all who put their faith in Him as the Christ. So what does this promise of “never thirsting” and having from our innermost being flowing a river of living water.
First, what does it mean that whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst.
First, this promise is a reference to the believer’s experience. To thirst and to have that thirst quenched with spring water is the analogy Jesus uses to describe the blessings that He brings to those who believe in Him. Consider a man lost and without water for a day or two. He hears from a fellow traveler that there is a spring about five miles due west. The man points the way to the spring. The direction is clear and the man gives a few land marks to follow. Our thirsty man starts in this direction. He goes over the hill and sees in the distance a pool of water. He begins to pick up his pace and begins to feel hopeful. With the water about twenty feet in front of him, he smiles in relief. Everything is going to be alright. He sits at the pool of water and begins to drink. He can feel the satisfaction of his body. He splashes his face. He rests and spends a few hours drinking deeply. This is a picture of the Christian life. Christianity is not about hoping to one day drink but Jesus says He will send His spirit and we will actually drink to our satisfaction and this experience of satisfaction will flow from us and satisfy others. We not only will drink from the well of blessing that Christ brings to us but we will be a source of this blessing to others.
Often Christianity is seen as a journey to heaven or a life of hope but in Jesus’ promise Christianity is not a life of hope or a life of hoping to one day drink the living water but is a life of actual drinking. Jesus gives us water and we drink it. This point is essential to understand. The experience of faith is not the experience of hope that helps one endure. This would be to describe the Spirit like a map directing one on a journey to water and life as the journey, but this is not the metaphor Jesus gives. Jesus says that we will actually drink the water. The promise of Jesus the Christ is that whoever is thirsty “let him come to me AND DRINK”. The life of the disciple is not essentially one of being inspired and encouraged to continue in the journey but to regularly arrive at an experience of drinking. This speaks of a spiritual experience of actual conscious connection with the Spirit of God which results in satisfaction and restoration.
The analogy of the man in the desert actually can be contrasted with the Christian walk in that the desert traveler’s level of desperation is not experienced by the disciple of Jesus as shown by the saying “never thirst”. The disciple is never so distant from the Spirit as to have his dryness be described as thirst. Personally, I do not know if in the physical sense I have ever actually experienced thirst. I have certainly had an experience where I desired to be satisfied by water but never in a situation where I was desperate for water. I have all my life lived in a home or was near running water. All I have ever had to do was to make a short walk and I could satisfy my thirst. Never have I been in a situation where I was at a loss as to where I could get water to satisfy my thirst. So too with the disciple, who has learned how to follow Jesus or as we shall see learned how to follow the teachings of Jesus. The disciple is a person who has learned how to get to and how to drink spiritually.
To explain this essential point I must jump ahead a little. In the next section, I will discuss mankind’s true problem as a lack of ability to live beautifully and morally. The root of this inability is a lack of conscious contact with our Father in heaven. Our emotional make-up “under the sun”, in a state of separation from conscious awareness of God according to the truth, is to lack what it takes emotionally and psychologically to love in every circumstance. The difference between the disciple and natural person is how we respond to conflict. The disciple who has deep in his or her emotional make-up an awareness of God’s love has the power to turn the other cheek and forgive and love his enemy from the heart. The power to live beautifully and morally and filled with unconditional love is conscious experience of God in the moment of conflict.
For example, I met just the other day a man who drank himself to sleep every night. He was filled with self-loathing that he could not drive from his consciousness without the aid of serious self-medication. This man is experiencing desperate thirst. He is filled with 10,000 various forms of fear and anger. His need is discipleship. Discipleship is the process where through obedience to the spiritual ways of Jesus our perspective on life becomes immersed in the presence of the grace and love of God. This new awareness of God empowers us to live a life satisfied by God alone, and, having learned this way, we are equipped to give to others a cup of water to quench their thirst.
This ability to satisfy one’s spiritual need like a person drinking water is not an ability all Christians possess. This ability is the outcome of the process of discipleship. Many Christians who have never been discipled are as spiritually dissatisfied and live lives just as dysfunctional as anyone. More on this later.
So this first saying of Jesus reveals that Jesus promised us that we would experience a life of satisfaction which He calls “never thirsting”. This is a promise which few have faith to believe but the fact is Jesus said it and to believe in Jesus is to believe Jesus. If we remain thirsting then the problem is a lack of understanding of the dicipleship process in our life. We lack the training on how to go about the process of drinking. The answer is not to lessen the promise but to acept the challenge to become a student of Jesus and enter into the promises of the Christ.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Kingdom Living - Inaugurated Eschatology
Here is my idea of the day:
We live before God not "just as if we had never sinned" BUT just as if Adam had never sinned.
Balanced by being wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but you get the idea.
We live before God not "just as if we had never sinned" BUT just as if Adam had never sinned.
Balanced by being wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but you get the idea.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Understanding N.T. Wright – Part 1 - Tools for the Task
“Tools for the Task” from The New Testament and the People of God
Introducing the Question of Christian Origins
Upon reading “Tools for the Task”, part II of N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, I found the principles so helpful that I feel compelled to share the wealth. This section is pretty heavy lifting for the uninitiated layman like myself. My aim here is to shed some light on how the principles, the Tools for the Task, that Bishop Wright introduces to the reader are actually quite common sense but also quite profound and practical.
To understand the epistemological framework that N.T. Wright is building as the Tools for the Task of his study of Christian Origins, it is helpful to know the kind of knowledge he will be attempting to obtain. In his life work, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Bishop Wright is attempting to answer some very pertinent and practical questions. In our 21st Century western culture, there is great confusion surrounding the origins of Christianity. This quagmire of opinions plays itself out in the media, in academia, and in the minds of both the educated and the not so educated. It seems every pseudo-intellectual with a Mocha Frappuccino has an opinion about the origins of the Christian faith, and all these opinions seem to be a pop version of the last 100 years of academic criticism. N.T. Wright’s quest is to utilize sound historical and philosophical methods to make a systematically thorough analysis of the question of Christian origins.
Many of the scenarios that play out in the popular culture in the form of popular myth surround the question of “Who is Jesus?” One common myth is that Jesus never proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. In this view, it was only the church that developed these messianic claims. In this scenario, we have Jesus of Nazareth, the “historical Jesus”, on the one hand, and the Christ of faith, the creation of the church, on the other. Such a view is quite well-developed within both academia and the popular mind. The fact is that academic, “historical”/critical research and theory has found its way into almost every nook and cranny of the popular mind. One example of the popular mind is quite archetypically represented by the pop icon John Lennon when he said, “I’m all right with Jesus but his followers were a bunch of stupid blokes.” This sentiment takes as accepted knowledge the dogma of the popular myth of Christian origins. This perspective accepts a restructuring of history which sees Jesus as an enlightened mystic, but the apostles or the biblical writers (that is, the early church) as primitive-minded folk who misguided their faith into Jesus and thus created the personality cult of Christianity.
Such a view takes many forms in the popular mind. For example, I have an acquaintance, an intelligent and educated man, who believes that the most likely scenario is that Jesus didn’t even ever exist. This reconstruction starts with the idea that there is a gap between the historical Jesus and the Christian faith as developed by the biblical writers and takes this gap to its logical extreme. This scenario simply says that if what we know about Jesus is actually the construction of the minds of the biblical writers, and if this construction is divorced from actual historical events, then on what basis do we believe that there was ever even a Jesus to begin with? The assumption is that there are actually no historical events which are the referents of the biblical texts. The biblical texts, from this perspective, represent entirely the mind of first-century fanatics. So the question is, "how do we know or can we even come to know anything at all about the actual historical events referred to by the biblical texts?" Answering these questions is vital because the historical events are the actual ground of historic Christianity.
As we ask these questions in order to uncover the history behind Christianity, (i.e. Christian origins), it will not do to simply either accept or reject biblical authority. This is the approach of the anti-intellectuals otherwise known as fundamentalists. Biblical authority as the sole basis for our epistemology is fundamentally circular logic. How do we know the truthfulness of the biblical history? We read the bible. It is easy to see the circularity of this reasoning. Instead, we must develop some tools for the task. In my next post, I will discuss what appears to me and to N.T. Wright as the best way forward.
Introducing the Question of Christian Origins
Upon reading “Tools for the Task”, part II of N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, I found the principles so helpful that I feel compelled to share the wealth. This section is pretty heavy lifting for the uninitiated layman like myself. My aim here is to shed some light on how the principles, the Tools for the Task, that Bishop Wright introduces to the reader are actually quite common sense but also quite profound and practical.
To understand the epistemological framework that N.T. Wright is building as the Tools for the Task of his study of Christian Origins, it is helpful to know the kind of knowledge he will be attempting to obtain. In his life work, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Bishop Wright is attempting to answer some very pertinent and practical questions. In our 21st Century western culture, there is great confusion surrounding the origins of Christianity. This quagmire of opinions plays itself out in the media, in academia, and in the minds of both the educated and the not so educated. It seems every pseudo-intellectual with a Mocha Frappuccino has an opinion about the origins of the Christian faith, and all these opinions seem to be a pop version of the last 100 years of academic criticism. N.T. Wright’s quest is to utilize sound historical and philosophical methods to make a systematically thorough analysis of the question of Christian origins.
Many of the scenarios that play out in the popular culture in the form of popular myth surround the question of “Who is Jesus?” One common myth is that Jesus never proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. In this view, it was only the church that developed these messianic claims. In this scenario, we have Jesus of Nazareth, the “historical Jesus”, on the one hand, and the Christ of faith, the creation of the church, on the other. Such a view is quite well-developed within both academia and the popular mind. The fact is that academic, “historical”/critical research and theory has found its way into almost every nook and cranny of the popular mind. One example of the popular mind is quite archetypically represented by the pop icon John Lennon when he said, “I’m all right with Jesus but his followers were a bunch of stupid blokes.” This sentiment takes as accepted knowledge the dogma of the popular myth of Christian origins. This perspective accepts a restructuring of history which sees Jesus as an enlightened mystic, but the apostles or the biblical writers (that is, the early church) as primitive-minded folk who misguided their faith into Jesus and thus created the personality cult of Christianity.
Such a view takes many forms in the popular mind. For example, I have an acquaintance, an intelligent and educated man, who believes that the most likely scenario is that Jesus didn’t even ever exist. This reconstruction starts with the idea that there is a gap between the historical Jesus and the Christian faith as developed by the biblical writers and takes this gap to its logical extreme. This scenario simply says that if what we know about Jesus is actually the construction of the minds of the biblical writers, and if this construction is divorced from actual historical events, then on what basis do we believe that there was ever even a Jesus to begin with? The assumption is that there are actually no historical events which are the referents of the biblical texts. The biblical texts, from this perspective, represent entirely the mind of first-century fanatics. So the question is, "how do we know or can we even come to know anything at all about the actual historical events referred to by the biblical texts?" Answering these questions is vital because the historical events are the actual ground of historic Christianity.
As we ask these questions in order to uncover the history behind Christianity, (i.e. Christian origins), it will not do to simply either accept or reject biblical authority. This is the approach of the anti-intellectuals otherwise known as fundamentalists. Biblical authority as the sole basis for our epistemology is fundamentally circular logic. How do we know the truthfulness of the biblical history? We read the bible. It is easy to see the circularity of this reasoning. Instead, we must develop some tools for the task. In my next post, I will discuss what appears to me and to N.T. Wright as the best way forward.
Friday, August 01, 2008
The Moral as Opposed to Ontological Nature of Character
Christianity is learned more like gymnastics than geometry.
In discipleship, it is vital that we realize we are teaching practices and activities and often activities of the heart. The practicioner eventually becomes skilled at these activities. Such an activity might be something like the skill of not resisting evil in the moment of conflict. This is a complex skill that take a lot of practice not the least of which is acts of prayer and practicing the prssence of God.
Goal of all activities is to develop a skill that translates into habit. The activity is to become reflexive or habitual. When an activity is a reflex or is habitual then that activity is said to be part of the persons character. In this model, character is not seen as something ontological but something moral. The reality is that the person with the character trait has a particular moral habit. By moral, I mean that the activity is a path taken in the context of many possible actions. Morally we exist in the realm of possibility. When a particular action or activity is taken consistently and habitually then the activity is called character. Character is then an aguired skill. Therefore, character is a moral choice that is made habitually. The actor has a moral skill or ability to perform the moral actions consistently.
Such character is learned more like gymnastics than geometry.
brad
In discipleship, it is vital that we realize we are teaching practices and activities and often activities of the heart. The practicioner eventually becomes skilled at these activities. Such an activity might be something like the skill of not resisting evil in the moment of conflict. This is a complex skill that take a lot of practice not the least of which is acts of prayer and practicing the prssence of God.
Goal of all activities is to develop a skill that translates into habit. The activity is to become reflexive or habitual. When an activity is a reflex or is habitual then that activity is said to be part of the persons character. In this model, character is not seen as something ontological but something moral. The reality is that the person with the character trait has a particular moral habit. By moral, I mean that the activity is a path taken in the context of many possible actions. Morally we exist in the realm of possibility. When a particular action or activity is taken consistently and habitually then the activity is called character. Character is then an aguired skill. Therefore, character is a moral choice that is made habitually. The actor has a moral skill or ability to perform the moral actions consistently.
Such character is learned more like gymnastics than geometry.
brad
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Jesus is the Christ – The Gospel Proper
I have noticed a huge gap in the thinking of today’s Christian. It is that when I ask what does “Jesus is the Christ” mean very few people give even a vaguely sufficient answer. If we do not know the content of this foundational Christian truth, then dare I say that we do not know the Gospel!!!
In all the literature, I find very little that gives a valid emphasis or a valid definition to the proclamation of the early church that "Jesus is the Christ". This is a serious problem.
Peter’s confession was just this that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. John wrote His gospel “that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ and that by believing we might have an eternal quality of life”. Yet, we do not believe that Jesus is the Christ if we do not understand what is meant by the proclamation “Jesus is the Christ”.
Here is the biggest problem in the Church and is at the root of all, yes all, our theological confusion and lack of moving forward in following Jesus, we do not, generally, know the promises that are granted through faith in the Gospel that the Christ has come.
Most people when I ask what does Jesus is the Christ mean say it means he is our savior and that He died for our sin. Certainly, the Christ did save us by dying for our sin. This event of the cross is in fact the central work of the Christ, but this is not the totality at all of what it means to believe that Jesus is the Christ. If we believe that the Christ means that God sent His Son to die for us then faith in the Gospel provides forgiveness of sin. If this is the Gospel, then it follows that the result is that those who believe this gospel will one day die and be granted access to heaven. The response to this is to serve Him out of gratitude. This is how the gospel is most often presented. But this is only a partial gospel.
Jesus is the Christ means much more than our sins being forgiven.
Jesus is the Christ means that the Christ, the anointed King whom God promised to send has come and He reigns over all heaven and earth in wisdom and power. The promise is that when the Christ comes He will bring to earth the kingdom of God. To believe the gospel is to believe first that Jesus is the Christ and that He is alive. Therefore all the promises are yes and amen in Him for He is the promised Christ. Because the Christ has come and He has poured out His Spirit on all who believe, we are now empowered to follow Him into His kingdom. The kingdom of God is within our reach today. The Christ has come!!!
The immediate relevance of this message is absolutely life changing. If the Christ has come, then every thing has changed, and in deed every thing has. We have access to the presence of God through His death and we walk in His power over sin and all our spiritual enemies because of His authority. I could go on and on but for this post suffice it to say that the key of keys for our generation is to rediscover the biblical gospel that Jesus is the Christ and to understand all the depths of the promises of God that are implied in this proclamation. If we begin first with understanding and believing this message then we will find that what necessarily follows is faith for the immediate presence of the kingdom
brad
In all the literature, I find very little that gives a valid emphasis or a valid definition to the proclamation of the early church that "Jesus is the Christ". This is a serious problem.
Peter’s confession was just this that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. John wrote His gospel “that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ and that by believing we might have an eternal quality of life”. Yet, we do not believe that Jesus is the Christ if we do not understand what is meant by the proclamation “Jesus is the Christ”.
Here is the biggest problem in the Church and is at the root of all, yes all, our theological confusion and lack of moving forward in following Jesus, we do not, generally, know the promises that are granted through faith in the Gospel that the Christ has come.
Most people when I ask what does Jesus is the Christ mean say it means he is our savior and that He died for our sin. Certainly, the Christ did save us by dying for our sin. This event of the cross is in fact the central work of the Christ, but this is not the totality at all of what it means to believe that Jesus is the Christ. If we believe that the Christ means that God sent His Son to die for us then faith in the Gospel provides forgiveness of sin. If this is the Gospel, then it follows that the result is that those who believe this gospel will one day die and be granted access to heaven. The response to this is to serve Him out of gratitude. This is how the gospel is most often presented. But this is only a partial gospel.
Jesus is the Christ means much more than our sins being forgiven.
Jesus is the Christ means that the Christ, the anointed King whom God promised to send has come and He reigns over all heaven and earth in wisdom and power. The promise is that when the Christ comes He will bring to earth the kingdom of God. To believe the gospel is to believe first that Jesus is the Christ and that He is alive. Therefore all the promises are yes and amen in Him for He is the promised Christ. Because the Christ has come and He has poured out His Spirit on all who believe, we are now empowered to follow Him into His kingdom. The kingdom of God is within our reach today. The Christ has come!!!
The immediate relevance of this message is absolutely life changing. If the Christ has come, then every thing has changed, and in deed every thing has. We have access to the presence of God through His death and we walk in His power over sin and all our spiritual enemies because of His authority. I could go on and on but for this post suffice it to say that the key of keys for our generation is to rediscover the biblical gospel that Jesus is the Christ and to understand all the depths of the promises of God that are implied in this proclamation. If we begin first with understanding and believing this message then we will find that what necessarily follows is faith for the immediate presence of the kingdom
brad
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Faith in Jesus as the Christ; Faith for the Kingdom of God
I remember when I was in seminary, one of my professors said that when we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” that we were praying for the second coming of Christ. This view, though extreme, is believed to a strong degree in the churches today. In the last post, I attempted to explain that whatever the kingdom is the kingdom is at hand. By at hand, Jesus meant “within reach”. The kingdom has drawn near to you, reach out and grab it through repentance and faith.
So the view of the kingdom as the return of Christ is a total misreading of what Jesus meant by the term the kingdom and it is at exactly this point that the church has gotten the gospel fundamentally wrong. The gospel promises the kingdom to the believers and we are to repent and press into the kingdom. This is in fact the meaning of the term “Christ”. When we say Jesus is the Christ, we are proclaiming or believing that Jesus is the one who can bring to earth the kingdom of God and that that kingdom life is available immediately.
Faith in Jesus as the Christ
We are saved through faith that Jesus is the Gospel. The Gospel is simply this, “JESUS IS THE CHRIST”. If we believe this gospel, we are saved. But if we do not know what the term Christ means or what it is the Christ brings to us how can we believe God for it. If we do not understand what we are saying when we say Jesus is the Christ, we do not have saving faith. We have no idea what the Gospel actually is? It is on this point that so many people who claim to believe that Jesus is the Christ appear to remain unchanged.
To believe that Jesus is the Christ is to believe that Jesus is the one who can bring you the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. This is saving faith in Jesus as the Christ. God has appointed one king, one leader, one Christ to bring to mankind the kingdom of God. This one king is Jesus, the Christ. It is through His blood that he has redeemed us, qualified us for the life of the kingdom and it is by this atonement that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to life and experience this kingdom today. So faith is faith that Jesus is the Christ and the Christ is the one who brings to His subject the Kingdom of God. So what is the Kingdom?
The Kingdom
The kingdom is defined clearly in scripture, “The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. Do you believe that Jesus can bring you a life of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit? Many people who claim to believe Jesus is the Christ do not believe that He can bring them righteousness. These people believe that Jesus can bring them righteousness when they go to heaven or at His return but they do not believe in a righteousness that is available today. They do not believe that the kingdom is available on earth as it is in heaven. This faith is faith in a righteousness in heaven or on earth in the age to come. But Jesus promises a righteousness immediately present in the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ brings to us a life, a kingdom life, of righteousness now through the Holy Spirit.
This is not a positional righteousness. This is not a righteousness in heaven but not on earth. If you believe this faith for a later righteousness, then you do not believe the totality of the blessings of the Gospel. The Gospel promises righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit in this life on earth as it is in heaven. Repent and believe.
This righteousness is not a perfect ed righteousness for certainly there is a fullness to come and a final battle to be won but the kingdom life of victory is available today through the work of the holy spirit and to believe in this immediately present kingdom quality of life is to believe in the Gospel.
brad
So the view of the kingdom as the return of Christ is a total misreading of what Jesus meant by the term the kingdom and it is at exactly this point that the church has gotten the gospel fundamentally wrong. The gospel promises the kingdom to the believers and we are to repent and press into the kingdom. This is in fact the meaning of the term “Christ”. When we say Jesus is the Christ, we are proclaiming or believing that Jesus is the one who can bring to earth the kingdom of God and that that kingdom life is available immediately.
Faith in Jesus as the Christ
We are saved through faith that Jesus is the Gospel. The Gospel is simply this, “JESUS IS THE CHRIST”. If we believe this gospel, we are saved. But if we do not know what the term Christ means or what it is the Christ brings to us how can we believe God for it. If we do not understand what we are saying when we say Jesus is the Christ, we do not have saving faith. We have no idea what the Gospel actually is? It is on this point that so many people who claim to believe that Jesus is the Christ appear to remain unchanged.
To believe that Jesus is the Christ is to believe that Jesus is the one who can bring you the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. This is saving faith in Jesus as the Christ. God has appointed one king, one leader, one Christ to bring to mankind the kingdom of God. This one king is Jesus, the Christ. It is through His blood that he has redeemed us, qualified us for the life of the kingdom and it is by this atonement that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to life and experience this kingdom today. So faith is faith that Jesus is the Christ and the Christ is the one who brings to His subject the Kingdom of God. So what is the Kingdom?
The Kingdom
The kingdom is defined clearly in scripture, “The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. Do you believe that Jesus can bring you a life of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit? Many people who claim to believe Jesus is the Christ do not believe that He can bring them righteousness. These people believe that Jesus can bring them righteousness when they go to heaven or at His return but they do not believe in a righteousness that is available today. They do not believe that the kingdom is available on earth as it is in heaven. This faith is faith in a righteousness in heaven or on earth in the age to come. But Jesus promises a righteousness immediately present in the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ brings to us a life, a kingdom life, of righteousness now through the Holy Spirit.
This is not a positional righteousness. This is not a righteousness in heaven but not on earth. If you believe this faith for a later righteousness, then you do not believe the totality of the blessings of the Gospel. The Gospel promises righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit in this life on earth as it is in heaven. Repent and believe.
This righteousness is not a perfect ed righteousness for certainly there is a fullness to come and a final battle to be won but the kingdom life of victory is available today through the work of the holy spirit and to believe in this immediately present kingdom quality of life is to believe in the Gospel.
brad
Thursday, April 10, 2008
The Kingdom of God is At Hand
Writing in 1963, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great reformed preacher, makes this concise statement about the present church's approach to the faith in his book The Kingdom of God:
“How does it come to pass that, with open Bibles before them, men and women should be wrong not so much about certain details with respect to the gospel, but about the whole thing? …wrong about its foundation, wrong about its central message, wrong about its objective, and wrong about how one comes into relationship with it.”
Lloyd Jones is commenting on Jesus’ announcement of the Kingdom of God which Lloyd-Jones understands to be the essence of the Christian message, “The Kingdom of God is at hand repent and believe!!!”. Lloyd-Jones is exactly correct in his articulation. The most foundational problem with the present church is that the church has gotten the gospel wrong. If we understanding the concept of the Kingdom of God, this formulation of the gospel is the most effective path to clarity the message, the promises, and the objective of the Gospel.
The Hebrew Mind in the First Century
We know that in Jesus’ time the Jewish expectation of the messianic kingdom was primarily political. The Messiah, the greater David, would bless all mankind by placing the Jewish nation in power above all nations. The Spirit of God would rest on the Messiah, the anointed one, and He would rule, through the state, in righteousness. Abraham’s vision of a city in whose architect and builder was God was seen as a vision in which the law would be fully instituted and established through the Messiah's reign.
The Kingdom of God is the establishment of God’s rule on earth. The Jewish people and the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day understood this rule of God as requiring primarily, or at least fundamentally, a political and legal reigning. The expatiation was that the Messiah would take over political and military power and establish the Law, the Torah.
The Jewish people, understandably given their status at the time, saw their problem as political. Therefore, it is understandable that they saw the solution as political. But Jesus, the true Christ, came to the Jewish people and revealed an entirely different problem and therefore an entirely different solution. Jesus did announce the immediacy of the Kingdom, but not a political kingdom. It is the path into the kingdom quality of life that set Jesus Christ and the First Century Christians apart from the Jewish expectation.
The key to understanding the Gospel is that Jesus’ proclamation was and still is that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Our response is still to be repentance and faith. Our faith still is that Jesus is the Christ who will bring the kingdom quality of life to earth. The kingdom is both God's reign on the earth and a truly heavenly quality of life. The promise of the kingdom is that these aspects of the kingdom are immediately available. BUT the realm of this kingdom is presently limited to a non-political realm.
At hand
The meaning of this at-handedness of the kingdom is that a truly heavenly quality of life is within reach. Something is ‘at hand'. It, the promised rule of God, is within arms length, within reach. The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom of God is within our immediate reach.
Believing in this "at handedness" of the kingdom is the exact problem with the modern proclamation of the gospel. The kingdom so often is seen as something we enter after we die. The kingdom, in this view, is not at hand at all. We come to saving faith, in this common evangelical paradigm, so that when we die we go to heaven. The kingdom of heaven is made available through the gospel only after we die. The kingdom, in this view, is actually not at hand at all.
Another less than complete view sees the kingdom as "at hand" but this immediate access to the kingdom is merely positional. This new status is in the heavens, but the heavens are not on earth. The great problem with this view is that our real problems, our marital happiness, how to maintain relationships, practical problems of well-being, are not solved by the gospel until heaven comes to earth in the future. Answers to real life problems, in the now, must be answered outside the gospel. This false view of the kingdom as purely heavenly, out there, supports a low view of the practical power of the Gospel to provide blessedness on earth.
The Reformed View
The reformed view sees the kingdom as both already and not yet. The already aspect of the kingdom is that the best part of heaven, the presence of God and the necessary spiritual power to live in progressive victory over sin, is currently available. The reality is that the kingdom of God is a truly happy and heavenly quality of life. This quality of life is progressively available to the believer through faith in Jesus Christ. This new quality of life progresses from the inside out and is the exact answer to the practical problems of human kind. A truly happy and heavenly quality of life is available immediately to the believer. This quality of life is not a new social or economic status, and it is not something that is so heavenly that it does not invade the conscious experience of the believer. Instead, the kingdom of God is the experience of heaven on earth through a Spirit to spirit walk with God. The kingdom of God is “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. The true gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, delivers a practical righteousness, a practical peace, and a practical joy to the follower of Jesus Christ.
The gospel brings to the believer the one thing needful to experience the good life. The one key characteristic of heaven is here now. This key characteristic of heaven is not, first and foremost, that there is no political oppression. Jesus, the Christ, did not deliver His people from political oppression. The key characteristic of heaven is not that there is no poverty and no suffering. Jesus, the Messiah, did not deliver His people from poverty and suffering. NO! The key characteristic of heaven is that God is present to the believer in their earthly experience. Jesus brought this one aspect of life to His followers at His coming. While He was here, He was the presence of God, as he prepared to leave this earth, He proclaimed that it was better that He leave. The purpose of His leaving was in order to bring the presence of God to His followers through the Holy Spirit. It is better that Jesus left because the best part of heaven, the power and presence of God, is now available to a greater degree to a greater number of His followers.
This truly happy and heavenly quality of life is indeed immediately present through the Lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives. Repent and believe the great news.
“How does it come to pass that, with open Bibles before them, men and women should be wrong not so much about certain details with respect to the gospel, but about the whole thing? …wrong about its foundation, wrong about its central message, wrong about its objective, and wrong about how one comes into relationship with it.”
Lloyd Jones is commenting on Jesus’ announcement of the Kingdom of God which Lloyd-Jones understands to be the essence of the Christian message, “The Kingdom of God is at hand repent and believe!!!”. Lloyd-Jones is exactly correct in his articulation. The most foundational problem with the present church is that the church has gotten the gospel wrong. If we understanding the concept of the Kingdom of God, this formulation of the gospel is the most effective path to clarity the message, the promises, and the objective of the Gospel.
The Hebrew Mind in the First Century
We know that in Jesus’ time the Jewish expectation of the messianic kingdom was primarily political. The Messiah, the greater David, would bless all mankind by placing the Jewish nation in power above all nations. The Spirit of God would rest on the Messiah, the anointed one, and He would rule, through the state, in righteousness. Abraham’s vision of a city in whose architect and builder was God was seen as a vision in which the law would be fully instituted and established through the Messiah's reign.
The Kingdom of God is the establishment of God’s rule on earth. The Jewish people and the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day understood this rule of God as requiring primarily, or at least fundamentally, a political and legal reigning. The expatiation was that the Messiah would take over political and military power and establish the Law, the Torah.
The Jewish people, understandably given their status at the time, saw their problem as political. Therefore, it is understandable that they saw the solution as political. But Jesus, the true Christ, came to the Jewish people and revealed an entirely different problem and therefore an entirely different solution. Jesus did announce the immediacy of the Kingdom, but not a political kingdom. It is the path into the kingdom quality of life that set Jesus Christ and the First Century Christians apart from the Jewish expectation.
The key to understanding the Gospel is that Jesus’ proclamation was and still is that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Our response is still to be repentance and faith. Our faith still is that Jesus is the Christ who will bring the kingdom quality of life to earth. The kingdom is both God's reign on the earth and a truly heavenly quality of life. The promise of the kingdom is that these aspects of the kingdom are immediately available. BUT the realm of this kingdom is presently limited to a non-political realm.
At hand
The meaning of this at-handedness of the kingdom is that a truly heavenly quality of life is within reach. Something is ‘at hand'. It, the promised rule of God, is within arms length, within reach. The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom of God is within our immediate reach.
Believing in this "at handedness" of the kingdom is the exact problem with the modern proclamation of the gospel. The kingdom so often is seen as something we enter after we die. The kingdom, in this view, is not at hand at all. We come to saving faith, in this common evangelical paradigm, so that when we die we go to heaven. The kingdom of heaven is made available through the gospel only after we die. The kingdom, in this view, is actually not at hand at all.
Another less than complete view sees the kingdom as "at hand" but this immediate access to the kingdom is merely positional. This new status is in the heavens, but the heavens are not on earth. The great problem with this view is that our real problems, our marital happiness, how to maintain relationships, practical problems of well-being, are not solved by the gospel until heaven comes to earth in the future. Answers to real life problems, in the now, must be answered outside the gospel. This false view of the kingdom as purely heavenly, out there, supports a low view of the practical power of the Gospel to provide blessedness on earth.
The Reformed View
The reformed view sees the kingdom as both already and not yet. The already aspect of the kingdom is that the best part of heaven, the presence of God and the necessary spiritual power to live in progressive victory over sin, is currently available. The reality is that the kingdom of God is a truly happy and heavenly quality of life. This quality of life is progressively available to the believer through faith in Jesus Christ. This new quality of life progresses from the inside out and is the exact answer to the practical problems of human kind. A truly happy and heavenly quality of life is available immediately to the believer. This quality of life is not a new social or economic status, and it is not something that is so heavenly that it does not invade the conscious experience of the believer. Instead, the kingdom of God is the experience of heaven on earth through a Spirit to spirit walk with God. The kingdom of God is “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. The true gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, delivers a practical righteousness, a practical peace, and a practical joy to the follower of Jesus Christ.
The gospel brings to the believer the one thing needful to experience the good life. The one key characteristic of heaven is here now. This key characteristic of heaven is not, first and foremost, that there is no political oppression. Jesus, the Christ, did not deliver His people from political oppression. The key characteristic of heaven is not that there is no poverty and no suffering. Jesus, the Messiah, did not deliver His people from poverty and suffering. NO! The key characteristic of heaven is that God is present to the believer in their earthly experience. Jesus brought this one aspect of life to His followers at His coming. While He was here, He was the presence of God, as he prepared to leave this earth, He proclaimed that it was better that He leave. The purpose of His leaving was in order to bring the presence of God to His followers through the Holy Spirit. It is better that Jesus left because the best part of heaven, the power and presence of God, is now available to a greater degree to a greater number of His followers.
This truly happy and heavenly quality of life is indeed immediately present through the Lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives. Repent and believe the great news.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Good News - Fewer teens are having sex
Fewer teens are having sex. This is really interesting and dramatic news statically speaking. The numbers really are significant. The question, I think, is what is the cause? It would only be speculation but I think contributors are:
1. A better economy: A good economy has a deep effect on peoples stress level and the need to medicate with irresponsible behavior. Kids see the system working and they plan for the future and therefore act more responsibly.
2. More open communication: Education is always good. We are more open and therefore kids are more prepared for the onslaught of sexual feelings and how to again act responsibly when faced with a sudden decision.
Any ideas as to the cause of this blessed upturn in responsible behavior.
God Bless, brad
1. A better economy: A good economy has a deep effect on peoples stress level and the need to medicate with irresponsible behavior. Kids see the system working and they plan for the future and therefore act more responsibly.
2. More open communication: Education is always good. We are more open and therefore kids are more prepared for the onslaught of sexual feelings and how to again act responsibly when faced with a sudden decision.
Any ideas as to the cause of this blessed upturn in responsible behavior.
God Bless, brad
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Sunday, July 01, 2007
The Teachings of Jesus and the Nations First Hospital
Pennsylvania Hospital History: Stories - Nation's First Hospital
Christopher Hitchens has written a book with the sub title "How Religion Poisens Everything". This I think is the most ignorant thing I have ever heard.
The above story tells how a quaker named Dr. Thomas Bond came to Benjamin Franklin to start a the first hospital. The hospital was then given the theme from Luke 10, "Take care of hi and I will repay you". This quote is from the story of the good Samritan, a story where Jesus teaches that true goodness of character is not founded in our heritage but in whether or not we care for the physical needs of others.
The power of Jesus' teachings especially the story of the Good Samitan to inspire care for the poor cannot be underestimated. For exaple, there is the teaching in Matt. 25 that to the extent that we care for the poor to this extent we are caring for Jesus Himself.
Christopher Hitchens has written a book with the sub title "How Religion Poisens Everything". This I think is the most ignorant thing I have ever heard.
The above story tells how a quaker named Dr. Thomas Bond came to Benjamin Franklin to start a the first hospital. The hospital was then given the theme from Luke 10, "Take care of hi and I will repay you". This quote is from the story of the good Samritan, a story where Jesus teaches that true goodness of character is not founded in our heritage but in whether or not we care for the physical needs of others.
The power of Jesus' teachings especially the story of the Good Samitan to inspire care for the poor cannot be underestimated. For exaple, there is the teaching in Matt. 25 that to the extent that we care for the poor to this extent we are caring for Jesus Himself.
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